Prison Overcrowding Impact on the U.S. Criminal Justice System
As the incarceration rate has been increasingly growing in the United States for the last four decades and reached approximately 1.5 million, prison overcrowding has become an important challenge for the criminal justice system of the United States. The American criminal justice system has implemented numerous successful solutions which have allowed to achieve the slight decrease of incarceration rate for the last several years. At the same time, the problem remains extremely significant and barely overcome, and thus the criminal justice system should concentrate on social work, particularly preventing crimes and reintegration of former prisoners, in order to achieve greater success in fighting prison overcrowding.
While the problem of prison overcrowding has been typical for the United States since the beginning of the 19th century, the issue had become increasingly significant four decades ago. After several decades of relative stability, the rate of incarceration has increased by more than 400 percent since the early 1970s. In 1978, the population of federal and states prisons was estimated in 307,276 people; in 2009, it reached the number of 1.6 million prisoners (Cohn et al., 2013). Travis, Western, and Redburn (2014) argue that the main cause of the rapid rise of incarceration was the “punitive political climate” (p.4), which arose during the 1970s and 1980s and included the politics of law and order pursued by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Numerous scientific studies prove highly negative consequences of growing incarceration. Duwe and Clark (2011) emphasize that imprisonment of a greater number of people leads to the fact that more people are facing obstacles during their social reintegration. Prison overcrowding leads to the deterioration of the living conditions and thus the health of prisoners. Moreover, the research shows that people who have served in overcrowded prisons are more likely to become recidivists as they more often violate conditions of their parole (Ruderman, Wilson, and Reid, 2015). At the same time, scientists are not sure whether the increased rate of incarceration has resulted in meaningful decreases in crime rate (Travis, Western, and Redburn, 2014). Thus, prison overcrowding in the United States has become an extraordinarily important problem for the criminal justice system to fight with.
The American criminal justice system has used a plethora of ways to combat prison overcrowding. One of the most important steps was to recognize the existence of the problem and the necessity of fighting with it. In the United States, this process has been largely implemented through the judiciary. Starting from the 1960s, federal courts in Arkansas and Alabama, and later in other states, began to acknowledge the problem and claim conditions of overcrowded imprisonment unconstitutional (Pitts, Griffin, and Johnson, 2014). Under the Brown v. Plata case in 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding violated the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as cruel and unusual punishment and supported retaining mandatory population limit in prisons. Population limit has been used as an approach to fighting prison overcrowding as well. As the …
